Amateur astronomy has come a long way in the past 3 decades in terms of availability of affordable, quality equipment, but finding objects to view is still a beginner's first big challenge. A night of casual deep sky observing through Scutum, Sagittarius and Scorpius last night using a 4 inch refractor reminded me of a similar summer night 30-odd years ago...
As a child in elementary school space science had always interested me. A like-minded classmate and I each squandered our life savings at the time to purchase department store refractors. His was a 40mm alt-az mounted Japanese refractor. I can't remember the brand, but I do remember him boasting that his optical tube was "longer" than mine, so it must be better. Mine was a 60mm Jason achromat on an alt-az mount. I recall the vivid Sci-Fi-esque artwork on the box, which I carried home from the local department store on the handlebars of my bicycle. I also remember the marketing hype - its key feature was 280x, so the longer tube benefit was rebuffed with the Jason's higher "magnification". Boy were we clueless.
It was our third night in a month sleeping out in the back yard trying to find some real "deep sky" objects with our scopes. While in two prior all-nighters we'd managed to pull in a naked eye Messier, M45, we were frustrated to the point of fits by our inability to locate the esoteric stuff like globulars, planetary nebulae, rich open clusters and the like. In retrospect, the long focal lengths and corresponding narrow fields of view, poor quality eyepieces, and near useless finders were largely to blame, but being young, impatient and new to the hobby, we had high hopes and higher expectations.
I remember the false start we had during the prior observing session. We stumbled on an open cluster near Cygnus that we were certain must be a Messier object, but were disappointed to find no object plotted at that location on our Edmund Maginitude 5 Star Atlas. We were crushed. I was to learn years later that what we'd stumbled on was Brocchi's Cluster (Collinder 399; "The Coathanger") in Vulpecula, but we were after Messier objects and could almost taste our first "discovery". That momentus event (our first "real" Messier discovery) had to wait until our third attempt.
My backyard in those days had great Southern exposure, but our house blocked the Eastern half of the sky. Still the skies were dark and clear and we had a perfectly framed view of the mighty scorpion to the South. Both of us thought we could see something like a faint puff of fog off the back of Scorpius' stinger. Being able to see the object we were hunting in our scopes turned out to be key. It was M7, "Ptolemy's Cluster", of course, and we had a relatively easy time getting our narrow FOV refractors homed in on the target once we knew where to look. Epiphany and celebration! We'd done it.
This discovery also gave us missing "context" for tracking down other Messier objects. The brighter ones would look like faint puffs of cloud with naked eye averted vision. The dimmer similarly looked fog-like in our finder scopes. It was as if the floodgates had openened. Armed with some confidence and experience and most importantly a better idea of scale and context, we located a string of objects in short order - M6 "The Butterfly", M4, M80, etc.
From that night long ago to last night, it occurred to me that the Scorpius-Sagittarius region is rich with deep sky objects. Like fishing in a barrel, the odds of successful object location are many fold higher than similar hunts in less well populated celestial geographies. In fact, I think the Scorpius-Sagittarius beach may be the ideal spot to for beginners to test the waters of Messier's ocean.
All the best,
Jim
As a child in elementary school space science had always interested me. A like-minded classmate and I each squandered our life savings at the time to purchase department store refractors. His was a 40mm alt-az mounted Japanese refractor. I can't remember the brand, but I do remember him boasting that his optical tube was "longer" than mine, so it must be better. Mine was a 60mm Jason achromat on an alt-az mount. I recall the vivid Sci-Fi-esque artwork on the box, which I carried home from the local department store on the handlebars of my bicycle. I also remember the marketing hype - its key feature was 280x, so the longer tube benefit was rebuffed with the Jason's higher "magnification". Boy were we clueless.
It was our third night in a month sleeping out in the back yard trying to find some real "deep sky" objects with our scopes. While in two prior all-nighters we'd managed to pull in a naked eye Messier, M45, we were frustrated to the point of fits by our inability to locate the esoteric stuff like globulars, planetary nebulae, rich open clusters and the like. In retrospect, the long focal lengths and corresponding narrow fields of view, poor quality eyepieces, and near useless finders were largely to blame, but being young, impatient and new to the hobby, we had high hopes and higher expectations.
I remember the false start we had during the prior observing session. We stumbled on an open cluster near Cygnus that we were certain must be a Messier object, but were disappointed to find no object plotted at that location on our Edmund Maginitude 5 Star Atlas. We were crushed. I was to learn years later that what we'd stumbled on was Brocchi's Cluster (Collinder 399; "The Coathanger") in Vulpecula, but we were after Messier objects and could almost taste our first "discovery". That momentus event (our first "real" Messier discovery) had to wait until our third attempt.
My backyard in those days had great Southern exposure, but our house blocked the Eastern half of the sky. Still the skies were dark and clear and we had a perfectly framed view of the mighty scorpion to the South. Both of us thought we could see something like a faint puff of fog off the back of Scorpius' stinger. Being able to see the object we were hunting in our scopes turned out to be key. It was M7, "Ptolemy's Cluster", of course, and we had a relatively easy time getting our narrow FOV refractors homed in on the target once we knew where to look. Epiphany and celebration! We'd done it.
This discovery also gave us missing "context" for tracking down other Messier objects. The brighter ones would look like faint puffs of cloud with naked eye averted vision. The dimmer similarly looked fog-like in our finder scopes. It was as if the floodgates had openened. Armed with some confidence and experience and most importantly a better idea of scale and context, we located a string of objects in short order - M6 "The Butterfly", M4, M80, etc.
From that night long ago to last night, it occurred to me that the Scorpius-Sagittarius region is rich with deep sky objects. Like fishing in a barrel, the odds of successful object location are many fold higher than similar hunts in less well populated celestial geographies. In fact, I think the Scorpius-Sagittarius beach may be the ideal spot to for beginners to test the waters of Messier's ocean.
All the best,
Jim
